By Edgardo Ochoa
Fishing gear Ghost Net has been lost, abandoned or otherwise discarded in all seas and oceans ever since fishing began. The extent and impacts of the problem have worsened significantly in recent years with the increasing levels of industrial fishing and also the increasing durability of fishing gear. Fishing activity has now extended to previously untouched offshore and deep-sea environments, which are often very sensitive to the impacts of abandoned fishing gear.
The author takes a look at a [...]

CROWD-SOURCED SCIENCE REVEALS HOODWINKER
A sunfish until recently thought to exist only in the Southern Hemisphere has been washed ashore in Santa Barbara, California. The hoodwinker (Mola tecta, from tectus or “hidden”) was first discovered in New Zealand five years ago, and later described by scientists as the first new species of sunfish in 130 years.
The 2m fish was stranded on Sands Beach in the Coal Oil Point Reserve, where it was assumed to be an oceanic sunfish (Mola mola) [...]

Lingering saltwater, sand, silt and other unsavory liquids can wear down on your wetsuit or get it stinky in a hurry. To keep your wetsuit in tip-top shape and have it last as long as you can fit, it’s important to properly prep and clean it before and after each dive. Here are a few tips from our Gear Editor on keeping your scuba diving wetsuits in great shape.
WETSUIT CARE — BEFORE YOU DIVE
• CHECK ALL ZIPPERS to make [...]

The Suunto D5 design enhances the user experience of the computer, making it suitable for all divers. An intuitive, three-button logic makes it easy for every diver to navigate through the dive modes which include Air, Nitrox, Gauge, Freedive, Watch and compass with intuitive graphical views, transflective display technology and LED backlight and it is rechargeable.
In addition to the new vibrate alarm feature alongside the standard beep alarms, you can set this unit to silent for uninterrupted underwater exploration.
Suunto has added one more language to [...]

10 tips Do Not Be “That Diver”
While you do your Open Water Diver training, you are under the watchful eye of your instructor and maybe a divemaster or two. That training may have been all shore dives or maybe from a boat. If you had boat dives and shared the boat with certified divers, you may have a good glimpse of how to dive from a boat. You may of also had your first introduction to “that diver”. Every [...]

Do you use up air faster than your dive buddy? We’ve got tips on Saving Air
Do you consistently run through your gas supply faster than other divers on the boat? Do you frequently have to end the dive before the rest of the group? What’s going on? And what can you do about it?
First, you can stop beating yourself up over it. People are different. Those with slower metabolisms will — other factors being equal — use less oxygen. [...]

Scuba diving started out with a reputation of being high risk and requiring great physical strength. Those early days used rubber dry suits and flotation gear was often a military surplus Mae West life jacket. The Mae West was only used at the end of the dive to keep you afloat. Divers use pure muscle power to counter difference in buoyancy. Equipment was often heavy and bulky. Clearly not a task for a youngster or member of the “weaker [...]

Knowledge is your Best Protection
hey say that for every Ying there is a Yang, For every good there is a bad. For scuba diving the bad is Decompression illness, or DCI. To quote the Diver Alert Network (DAN), the largest organization focused on dive medicine,
“DCI encompasses two diseases, decompression sickness (DCS) and arterial gas embolism (AGE). DCS is thought to result from bubbles growing in tissue and causing local damage. While AGE results from bubbles entering the lung circulation, [...]

The dive computer is arguably one of the greatest technological advances in the sport of scuba diving since Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan invented the Aqua-Lung. Practically every diver in the water today uses a dive computer to monitor his or her depth and bottom time, rather than dive tables. But how well do you know your dive computer? Here’s how to maximize your bottom time and your safety. In the PADI open water course now teaches all new divers how to use a computer not [...]

Not as Complicated as It May Look
The first time for anything can be overwhelming, that first day of High School, your first date, your first driving lesson and, yes, your first diving lesson. When you slipped behind the steering wheel of the car for the first time, you had years of experience observing other drivers as they used the different tools – accelerator pedal, brakes, steering wheels – that a driver uses. Knowing the basic function of those items [...]